Thunderbolt

by Wilbur Smith

  He didn’t hit me again, and mercifully he didn’t hit any of the others either. He didn’t need to: the blow to me made a good enough point. By the time I’d clawed my way upright onto one knee the guard wasn’t even bothering to stand over me.

  ‘You OK?’ said Xander. Both he and Mo were helping me up.

  I tried to say ‘yes’, but it came out more like a cough and tasted, faintly but worryingly, of blood.

  Xander looked unconvinced.

  Amelia, taking me at face value, said, ‘Good, but possibly that was just a little bit pointless.’

  ‘It was brave,’ said Mo. At least he didn’t follow up with ‘but’.

  Focusing on the horizon I saw that the approaching boat was a fair bit closer. It looked like some sort of deep-sea fishing outfit, prickling with stumpy rods. We’d be off Kenya here: the red dots aboard were no doubt game fishermen out of Mombasa or perhaps Watamu. What would the wealthy fishermen on board see? The battered cruiser we were on, a sleek speedboat, and a foundering, swamped yacht with a snapped mast.

  No doubt they’d picked up the same distress call as Flip-flops. Would they wonder why nobody was now on the other end of the yacht’s shortwave radio, or were they assuming that it had stopped working? Presumably they’d expect us, the rescuers, to have a working radio and the ability to speak to them. All the pirates were in view: none on a radio. Maybe that’s what made the fishermen slow down when they were still a fair way off, or perhaps they caught sight of the two sailors bound either side of the broken mast-stump. It certainly wasn’t my flag-T-shirt waving that made them alter course. But they’d got wind that something was wrong, and by the time I was able to breathe properly again – despite the molten pain in my chest – their boat was veering away.

  Immediately the dive boat gave chase. Pete had always run it up to top speed gradually, but Barrel-man must have thrown both throttles all the way forward at once. The boat pretty much leaped from the sea. It careened off a low wave and the propellers bit nothing before slamming into the water again.

  The captain slewed us round too, headed towards the fishing boat at a comparatively leisurely pace. This meant we were leaving the sailors on their swamped yacht.

  I couldn’t stop myself looking back as we moved off. To begin with they just sat there, but after a few moments, when we’d opened up a safe distance, I was relieved to see movement.

  The sunburnt woman, evidently having managed to tear herself free of the gaffer tape, got up and went to liberate her partner. His head was still bowed. That cut on his leg must have been painful. And yet – I tried to conjure up some hope for them – their yacht hadn’t sunk any lower in the water while we’d been alongside. Hopefully their distress signal was still pulsing, or the radio was still operational, or they had flares. I grasped at these straws as they slipped from sight.

  Without Pete’s boat in pursuit I’m pretty sure the deep-sea fishermen would have made their escape. But the speedboat, a greyhound after a cat, ran them down in a matter of minutes. We floundered along, following the chase. I saw something flashing in the dive boat well before I heard the staccato crackling of gunfire.

  The anglers had come to a halt by the time we caught up, with the dive boat slowly circling them. Would they have their own weapons with which to fight back? It didn’t seem so, or at least if they were armed they must have thought themselves outgunned, and since they couldn’t flee or fight they’d opted instead to give in. The speedboat burbled back to us and the big guard from our boat jumped in. The pirates evidently wanted a two-man boarding party for this catch.

  My first thought then was that the captain was the sole pirate left on board with us. He must have reckoned Mo would still be watching his back – and perhaps the boy was – but something about the way he had tried to stop me getting myself shot made me doubt it.

  ‘Guys,’ I said.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ asked Xander.

  The burning in my chest meant I felt completely unready to follow through with what I was about to propose, which may have been why I said, ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ instead of spelling it out.

  Mo said, ‘No! You must learn! It is madness to resist now.’

  At which Amelia said, ‘Completely. Say we throw the guy overboard. Then what? Off we set in a slow boat to nowhere. You think the armed crew in that power boat will simply wave us off?’

  Through gritted teeth I said, ‘We have to do something though.’

  ‘Yes,’ murmured Mo. ‘But only when we can be effective. We should wait. I will help you plot a proper escape, once we reach land.’

  Since we’d been captured, I’d not thought about when we would set foot ashore again. I’d not allowed myself to dwell on the question because I’d actually been more worried about ‘if’ than ‘when’.

  But unless these pirates were planning on throwing us overboard – which made no sense given they’d kept us safe till now – they would presumably have to hang on to us until they made landfall.

  Operating out of a forty-foot boat, they wouldn’t be staying out at sea indefinitely. Sooner or later they would have to dock to cash in their loot and pick up supplies.

  Mo was right; the thing to do was wait until then. But watching Barrel-man, Flip-flops and the Bear, who’d socked me with his rifle, as they prepared to board the fishing boat, I felt sick that I could do nothing to help now.

  20.

  It turned out that the deep-sea fishermen hadn’t in fact reached the same conclusion as me. The three guys on deck with their hands in the air did make it look like they’d surrendered, but as Barrel-man brought the dive boat alongside so the guards could climb aboard, a fourth fisherman jumped up among the stumpy rods sticking from the fishing boat’s stern.

  He had a pistol in his hand. It bucked three times in quick succession, then jammed.

  The dive boat was close by. This fisherman had waited to take his chance at close range. And he hit his mark. The Bear who’d battered me immediately spun sideways and dropped to his knee among the life jackets still spread out in the hold. But he’d barely thumped to the deck before the other guard, Flip-flops, unleashed his semi-automatic.

  Compared to the pock-pock-pock of the pistol, Flip-flops’ gun was shatteringly loud. He let loose in bursts. Chunks of fibreglass sprayed from the deck of the fishing launch and the man who’d fired the pistol was thrown clear out of sight.

  The Bear was already clawing himself up out of the bilge. His left arm was vivid with blood from the elbow down. With his other hand he thrust his gun towards Barrel-man, who took it. They were swapping roles.

  The Bear took control of the dive launch one-handed, Barrel-man covered the target boat with the rifle, and Flip-flops scrambled across the rail as the two boats came together. Once he was safely aboard Barrel-man followed, and then the Bear drew Pete’s boat away. Either the guy was in shock or just incredibly tough. He inspected his hurt arm with mild interest, as if it belonged to somebody else, before picking Pete’s chamois leather out of the compartment next to the driver’s seat and wrapping it tightly around the wound.

  I couldn’t see what was happening on board the fishing boat, but somebody started shouting. The sound was immediately drowned out by another crackle of gunfire. There was a high scream, then sobbing.

  ‘They’ve killed him,’ Amelia stated.

  She was right. Barrel-man levered the limp body of one of the anglers – presumably the guy who’d tried to fight back – up over the gunwale. He’d been shot in the head. I tried not to take in what was left of his face, just registered a middle-aged white guy with thick limbs and a big stomach. His T-shirt rose up to reveal its paleness as Barrel-man slid him over the side of the boat.

  This seemed to be the pirates’ method: show everyone you mean business by making an example of at least one victim. In retrospect Pete had been lucky to be thrown overboard alive. Lucky or extremely unlucky, depending on how you looked at it, I thought grimly.

  The body rolled o
ver a couple of feet beneath the surface, blood clouding the clear blue water. I didn’t want to stare at the dead man but couldn’t help it. He was drifting our way. I tried to focus on the poor guys still aboard the fishing boat. One of them was shaking so hard it was visible from this distance. I couldn’t see either pirate aboard, but presumably one of them had his gun trained on the guys on deck, while the other was doing the looting.

  ‘What was that?’ Xander asked nobody in particular. He was pointing at the water right where the dead guy was floating. A dark blur rocketed up into the corpse, punching it through the surface, before immediately dragging it down again. The first shark still had hold of the man’s leg when the second one struck his body, and a third veered in on the second one’s tail. More immediately joined the fray. The water was soon boiling with them, their thrashing enough to create pink foam. It was a chilling sight, and if I had struggled to look away beforehand I was mesmerised now. Amelia and Xander were too. Only Mo kept his eyes on the fishing boat.

  ‘That happened so fast,’ said Xander.

  ‘It’s a common misconception that sharks can smell blood from miles away,’ said Amelia quietly. ‘Their sense of smell is acute, but it’s actually more like a few hundred metres. These ones will have been in the area already. Maybe they were following the fishing boat.’

  ‘Or us,’ I muttered.

  ‘Less likely,’ said Amelia decisively.

  It didn’t take long for the frenzy to die down. The sharks quickly dragged what was left of the body too deep to see. As far as I could remember Pete hadn’t been bleeding when Barrel-man threw him overboard. He’d been conscious, he was strong, he was a formidable swimmer, with a life jacket, and a good knowledge of the currents, and … the more I tried to convince myself the dive master might have survived, the heavier the dread lay in the pit of my stomach.

  Barrel-man was in view again now, ordering the anglers to hand over watches, wallets, phones. They gave up everything immediately, no doubt wanting the pirates gone as quickly as possible. Flip-flops passed two bags full of spoils they’d rinsed from the fishermen across to the one-armed Bear in the stern of the dive boat, and within minutes we were pulling away from the fishermen entirely. Though not as forlorn as the yacht before it, the fishing boat seemed equally adrift. Had the pirates incapacitated it, or would they be able to make their way back to the safety of port? I asked Mo.

  He shrugged. ‘Sometimes the engine is broken in the aftermath.’

  ‘Nice use of the passive tense,’ said Amelia.

  I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by that but got the gist: these guys tended to maroon their victims at sea. ‘Where are we headed now?’ I asked Mo.

  He gave another shrug. ‘I don’t know, but I’ll listen out.’

  ‘Not back to port ourselves then?’

  ‘That depends,’ he said, but didn’t elaborate.

  Having realised we’d be returning to land at some point, it struck me now that I should do whatever I could to make it happen sooner rather than later. But what? Pretending to fall ill wouldn’t work. We weren’t that valuable to them. What they cared about was their ability to hunt down boats. How could I make it harder for them to do that?

  ‘Mo,’ I said. ‘Do you think you can persuade the boss to put me back in Pete’s boat?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Mo replied.

  ‘Tell him we’d be less likely to mutiny if we were separated,’ said Xander. ‘Divide and conquer, et cetera.’

  ‘That’s not quite what it means,’ said Amelia, ‘But still. Why do you want to be stuck back there with those monsters anyway?’ she added, flicking a thumb at Barrel-man, Flip-flops and the Bear, puttering along behind us.

  ‘I just do. Trust me.’

  ‘I’ll ask,’ said Mo. ‘But don’t hold your breath.’

  ‘I’ve never understood that expression,’ Amelia said, with her does-not-actually-compute face on. It was a relief to see it – familiar and reassuring – again, given the contrast with what we’d just witnessed. ‘When I ask a question, I never hold my breath while waiting for the answer.’

  Mo looked like he might reply but he must have sensed my agitation, because instead of debating the point he set off to put the actual question to the captain.

  21.

  Mo had underestimated his influence over the captain who, it turned out, thought reorganising us all across the two boats was a good precaution. Xander did well to come up with that idea. Maybe my T-shirt-waving helped. I was the troublemaker to be kept apart from the others.

  Barrel-man, who seemed to be second in command, would watch me in the speedboat. Mo joined us as an extra pair of eyes. Flip-flops and the captain rode in the bigger boat with Xander, Amelia and the wounded Bear, who retreated to his bunk, as if a quick lie-down might cure him of the bullet he’d taken to the forearm.

  It’s possible the captain would have set sail for home to patch up his man, injured in the attack, but I couldn’t be sure of that. With the speedboat out of action, however, they’d be less capable of hunting down more victims. Helping Pete prepare to launch the boat earlier in the week had given me an idea of how I could successfully sabotage it, but I had to wait for nightfall before I could risk executing my plan.

  I spent the time on the rearmost bench seat, looking out at our wake. Once again, the pirates had chosen to tow the speedboat at a safe distance behind the cruiser, so for now the big outboards were silent. In the aftermath of the storm the sea had turned glassy and we were drawn on smoothly, tugged by the cruiser, our wake quietly etched across the mirrored face of the sea. I ran my eyes out to where the expanding silver V disappeared over and over again. As the afternoon dropped into evening the wake vanished closer to the boat. After nightfall I had to look straight down to see it.

  At some point Mo had come to sit closer to me. I could tell that he wanted to talk to me, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. I still didn’t know whether I could trust him. It seemed so, but why take the risk?

  Well, with his help I could have made sure Barrel-man didn’t wake up and spot me when I set to work; without it I’d have to wait until I was sure both of them were sound asleep before taking the plunge. Possibly because I knew that Mo would try to persuade me not to do it, I decided on the latter course of action.

  I lay back on the bench seat and waited for Barrel-man’s head to loll and stay lolled. He was still sprawling in Pete’s chair with his feet up on the boat’s dash. When Mo got no joy out of me he retreated to his own bench so that he could lie down flat. I watched him too, waiting until both of them had stayed still for a good quarter of an hour before chancing it.

  My plan, such as it was, was to use Pete’s siphon to do exactly what he’d warned me to avoid doing with it at all costs. I’d made sure I was stationed in the stern, next to the fuel tank and within reach of the compartment in which I knew Pete had stowed the long, thin coil of fuel hose we’d used as a siphon.

  When the time came, I pried open that compartment super-slowly and retrieved it. Then I sprang the catch on the dive boat’s fuel tank. So far, so good. I unwound the coiled pipe. This was the moment of truth. Would it be long enough, fully uncoiled, for one end, draped between the big outboards, to reach into the sea, while the other end was tucked inside the fuel tank?

  Easily, it turned out. To make sure I got a good flow going I sucked on the other end of the hose hard and long enough to flood my mouth with saltwater. It didn’t taste as bad as all that. Once the water started to flow, I carefully angled the end of the hose I’d sucked into the fuel tank.

  Sitting where I was, so close to the tank, the wash of the sea against the hull wasn’t quite loud enough to mask the tinkling of seawater into the petrol, and though that probably wouldn’t have been the case even just a few feet away, I couldn’t be sure, so it was a relief when I found I could stop the trickling sound by angling the tip of the tube sideways into the lip of the tank.

  Pete had explained that the engine could handle a bit o
f water contamination, but a lot would quickly wreck the injectors, so I topped the tank up a fair way, not right to the top, because that would have made the tampering obvious, but with enough seawater to cause a problem.

  I kept one eye on the man in the captain’s chair, occasionally checking that Mo was still asleep on his side. It’s amazing that a bit of suction can make water flow uphill. Amelia would probably have wanted to explain the physics of the thing – no doubt Mo could recite whatever equations made it happen too – but for me the incapacitating sound of the trickling was enough.

  When I was sure I’d trashed the fuel properly I eased the tube out of the tank and gently secured the lid again. The whole operation, carried out so slowly, had taken a good ten minutes, and I wasn’t done yet. Not quite. Inevitably, it was with the last bit of the job – returning the length of hose to its rightful place – that I messed up.

  22.

  I must have coiled the hose too tight. As I’d pulled it up over the stern, I wound it round one hand with the other, hoping that by keeping it in a ball I’d stop it slapping about. Water dripped in my lap as I did this, but silently, so it didn’t matter. Once I had the coil ready, I eased open the storage compartment beneath my seat and gently pushed the bundle inside.

  Maybe I pressed it down too low, in among the other stuff, close to the hinge, or possibly it was just that winding the hose up tight gave the thing a spring-like purpose: to unravel. Either way, when I let go the compartment door sprung open immediately and a half empty plastic oil canister flopped out of the door and down onto the fibreglass deck.

  I grabbed at it and missed, knocking it sideways against the hull. The hollow clattering sound it made was very different to the gentle plashing of the water around us and, as I was stuffing the damn thing back in the compartment, out of the corner of my eye I saw Barrel-man jerk upright in his seat.

  He was shrugging himself awake and began to turn around.